


no light, no light.

by delusionalwithlove



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Grief/Mourning, Post Reichenbach
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-25
Updated: 2012-01-25
Packaged: 2017-10-30 02:47:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 893
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/326920
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/delusionalwithlove/pseuds/delusionalwithlove
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John faces the morning after- well, <i>after</i>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	no light, no light.

**Author's Note:**

> No light, no light in your bright blue eyes / I never knew daylight could be so violent. ([x](http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/florencethemachine/nolightnolight.html)) ([on livejournal](http://ireneadlers.livejournal.com/666.html))

He wills it not to, but the morning comes anyway in its usual pervasion, cleaving through the hazy dark. The morning after- well, after. He opens his eyes as sickly daylight pools over his face, and the waking feels like drifting up from the bottom of a pool, sliding out from the protective grasp of deep water, where he's brimming with his own muffled heartbeat and his senses are quietly perched at the very edge of his notice. The first rush of air hits his lungs with a rush of adrenaline like the edge of a knife at his throat; it settles into his chest, and hardens there, anchoring him to the bed.

A shadow in the shape of Mrs. Hudson moves to the forefront of his vision and blessedly blocks the window, curtains thrown open to reveal a sky the color of the icy gaze forever burned into him; a cloudless, anemic blue. His limbs are scattered across the expanse of the bed and he feels the restlessness like an itch fading after too long of not-scratching and he starts when clammy fingertips find his forearm where it lies over the blankets.

Mrs. Hudson withdraws. She murmurs something that he doesn't catch, not because he can't hear her, but because he steadfastly refuses to. Listening will anchor him to this day, will obligate him to get up shower eat breathe speak hold himself up despite the weight of it settled across his back. It will mean he has to plan a funeral (or, more likely, listen to Mycroft plan a funeral) he cannot allow to happen. It will mean he has to wade through the enormous hollowing out of his life.

Another murmur. He closes his eyes and measures the seconds by the cadence of her voice. She endeavors to lift his arm with both hands as if she means to pull, as if she expects him to resist, but he doesn't, and it seems the dead weight of him, the lack, is enough. She places his arm gently back on the bed and he feels the blankets being pulled instead. Not off, as he expects, but up, and for a moment he wonders if he'll be covered like a corpse, finds that he oddly wouldn't mind this, but she places the edge just under his chin.

There is no evidence, no click of the door into its frame or even footsteps, but he knows Mrs. Hudson has retreated by the way all the warmth suddenly leaks out of the room. He is suddenly terrified to open his eyes, and he's six years old again, but this time he's not warding off some terrible beast that has slithered from his imagination to stand over his bed. It's what he won't see, through the curtains and door purposefully left open to coax him into this day, in the echo of the hallway, the stairwell; it's the conspicuous dearth that pins him to where he lies and presses down against the wet seam of his eyelids.

"Mrs. Hudson," and though it's low enough that he almost isn't sure if he said it aloud, he hears her on the stairs, like she hadn't really gone. His voice is still coarse, his throat scratched bloody by tears unshed. He hasn't really cried yet, not properly, though out of necessity he wrenched out a few drops before the sun rose as he hovered at the threshold of the flat, unable to bring himself to interrupt the silence of their shared space save for one hand, palm pressed reverently to the peeling white of the door frame.

It had taken nine hours - two hovering in the waiting room at St. Bart's (though the certificate of death was signed within the first ten minutes), three and a half folded into a metal chair at Scotland Yard, the rest spent walking, just walking without really seeing until he stumbled into the path of a CCTV camera and found a shiny black car waiting for him on the corner - nine hours to release three rivulets of saline, enough to propel him upstairs and out of his shoes and jacket and into bed wearing everything else. Enough to ease the suffocation of 'numb' and to fall blessedly out of consciousness.

He can feel her in the doorway, and he uses his diaphragham like a bellows to push the words out before he loses them. "One day. Just one, please." He feels himself deflating back into tangle of his sheets, and thankfully Mrs. Hudson seems to need no further explanation. The greatest gift she can give him is this brief twenty-four hours, this reprieve, to immerse himself in feeling, to drown in it before he must concede to routine, to function, and hold himself up like a bag of bones masquerading among the living.

He doesn't start this time when he feels her hand touch his where it lies under the sheet, and this one gesture unfolds a litany of unspoken offers; the words themselves already long spent, though she can't help but to reiterate one last time, "I'll be downstairs if you need me, dear," and he finds himself, as usual, endlessly grateful for her existence. A rustle of curtains and the click of the door follow her out, and he allows himself to be lost to the sacred clutch of darkness.


End file.
